Lawyer Bob Tarantino does yeoman work parsing the StatsCan data that really matters.

Has the violent crime rate been “stable” over the last ten years? Kind of. If you ignore little things like the fact that the most serious assaults have increased over the past ten years by rates of, oh, 32.3% (assault level 2 – involving use of a weapon/bodily harm) or 18.6% (assault level 3 – aggravated), or that forcible confinement/kidnappings have increased more than 100% over the last 10 years. But that ten year period of “stability” is rather thin gruel when you realize that we’re holding “stable” at an insanely high violent crime rate – one which is roughly quadruple what it was when comprehensive statistics began to be maintained.